RSVP : Call the office (510)204-9200 or send an email to info@ashbyvillage.org
WHEN: Friday April 6 at 3:00-4:00 pm
WHERE: Ashby Village Office
1821 Catalina Ave,
Berkeley, CA 94707
PARKING: neighborhood street parking might be limited!
Please call us if you need a ride at least one week before the event
Does the Mind Perhaps Survive Death? There is Interesting Evidence.
If you’re convinced the physical sciences have already discovered everything important about the world, of course the mind does not survive death. Mind is produced by the operation of the brain, the brain gets injured, diseased, finally deprived of oxygen and stops working, no more mind, end of story. What’s to discuss? And those people who think they have souls that might live on? They believe in a delusion, of course, but there are a lot worse delusions people believe in, it’s a free country, we scientific types tolerate them…and they control a lot of votes… But while very few people are aware of it, there are a lot of both field observations and scientific experiments that strongly suggest that there’s more to the mind than the brain, even some more direct (but quite tricky) data that we may personally survive death in some form. Charley Tart, Ashby Village member for the last year and retired UCD professor, has been studying this and related areas for half a century and will share some of what’s known. Charley won’t attempt to convince anyone as to what may happen. He will disappoint those who want an absolute YES or absolute NO to the survival question, he hasn’t made up his own mind, but strongly believes (an old-fashioned attitude in this time of disregarding facts) that while we need faith in life, it’s good if our faith is as fully informed by facts and reason as possible.
About Charles Tart
Charley Tart and his wife Judy have lived in Berkeley since the mid-70s, and are in their second year as Village members. He was a professor of psychology at UC Davis for a quarter of a century, where he researched altered states of consciousness like hypnosis, meditation and dreaming, as well as ways to make ESP function more reliably, then took early retirement to then put in another quarter century at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sofia University) in Palo Alto. Transpersonal psychology, one of the youngest branches of psychology, works on gaining deeper understanding of people’s spiritual experiences and on building bridges between the best of science and the best of spirituality. Now Charley is “pseudo-retired” – he still advises students, contributes papers to journals and encourages a broadening of the scope of science in ways like contributing to the creation of the new Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Science. Not that there’s anything wrong with materialism when you remember it’s an excellent analytical tool, but when it ossifies into an automatic answer that allows aspects of human experience to be dismissed without examination, that’s a serious shortcoming. Now in his 80s, Charley believes the studies he knows of suggesting that some aspects of our minds may survive death will be very interesting to fellow Ashby Villagers. Is Charley convinced we survive death? No, but there’s some really interesting evidence to talk about…